Henri Nouwen and Theological Education



A Conversation with Henri Nouwen about Theological Education

Henry Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest, born in 1933. His life ended with a heart attack on 12 September 1996. His studies first centred on psychology, which he taught at Notre Dame University in New York, but then moved on to spirituality which he taught at Yale and Harvard. Always a deeply complicated, insecure man seeking to be simple and at peace, his final years were as chaplain to L’Arche Daybreak Community in Toronto, a home for people with intellectual and physical disabilities.

Nouwen’s teaching and preaching was, by all accounts, inspiring and enthralling, as he poured himself into real engagement with his audience. However, it was through his books that he is known most widely. Nouwen wrote, in all, about 40 books or, as someone said, one book 40 times. Their power and influence was like no other spiritual writer in the 20th century. Although he was treasured by many Roman Catholics, he was an example of the truth that genuine spirituality crosses denomination barriers.

I never met Henri Nouwen in person, but my conversation with him started through his writings while I was a young missionary lecturer in Nigeria. In the 1970s, he wrote a series of three articles for Sojourners, the magazine of the left of centre evangelical community of the same name. The articles were on Solitude, Silence and Prayer. They were a product of his lectures on The Desert Fathers and they later became perhaps his most influential book, The Way of the Heart. His words had a simplicity and power I had not encountered before. Not only did I find them personally life changing but they became a doorway into the richness of the classical Western spiritual tradition. Twenty-five years later I am still using that little book with my students to open the same door for them. So, I encountered Nouwen first while a theological lecturer plying my trade in a ministry-training college in Africa, linked to a university and serving a church. I was living a life of words – read, written and spoken – and he challenged me to balance that with silence and prayer. It was not long before I found that Nouwen had also written on education and his ideas, again revolutionary and simple, as expressed in Reaching Out had a significant influence on my ministry.

That is what this article is about. Henri Nouwen is a deeply fruitful source for understanding the nature and practice of theological education. I choose to limit my conversation with Nouwen to the 10 years that he spent at Yale Divinity School, the period when his most important thoughts on theological education were expressed. He later describes them as, “10 joyful years”. He arrived there in 1971, almost 40 years of age and left in 1981, almost 50. They were the most productive time of his life. Four extraordinary books, The Way of the Heart, The Wounded Healer, Reaching Out and The Genesee Diary came out of this time and they reflect his understanding of his calling as a teacher at Yale. In those 10 years Nouwen “lit-up” theological education with lights coming in at new angles and showed what can be done in a fresh way, even within the constraints of a traditional school of theology.

In this article, I want to explain something of Henri Nouwen’s ideas on theological education and then talk things through with him in the light of what has happened in thological education and my own experience since that fruitful decade at Yale.

A critique of current practice

Nouwen is scathing about current educational practice. He calls it “one of the greatest tragedies of our culture”[1]. (RO p78) and regards the application of such pedagogy to theological education as “ridiculous”. Nouwen is fundamentally protesting against the over-contextualising of theological education in the West – that we have allowed it to adopt uncritically the objectives, attitudes and expected outcomes of terteriary secular education. The special nature of theological education had not been powerful enough to maintain its own ontology or to impede the encroachment of negative elements in contemporary academia. Theology as enlightenment science is no longer authentic theology and theology taught with the same methodology as another subject is a betrayal of its Christian life-changing intention. Nouwen, in particular, makes four points.

Firstly, he questions the way in which academic obligations are laid on students.

“As teachers, we have become insensitive to the ridiculous situation in which adult men and women feel that they “owe” us a paper of at least 20 pages. We have lost our sense of surprise when men and women who are taking courses about the questions of life and death, anxiously ask how much is “required”[2]. (RO p79)

So students sacrifice the time and space to think, explore and grow and instead work to secure credits. Tutors, in their turn, become “bosses” or “policemen” rather than guides.

Secondly, on the back of secular methodology has come the fearfulness and defensiveness that is rife in a university setting as part of secular society. We live in a competitive society and education is the custodian of society’s attitudes. It revolves around competition, the seeking of grades and credits, sometimes rivalry, reinforced by acclaim and protected by punishment when levels are not achieved or work is not handed in at the proper time. This does not lead to an atmosphere where students feel free rather than defensive, open and safe with each other rather to a situation where they are wary of revealing themselves. Tutors often suffer from a similar fear, protecting their status before the class by objectivity, the desire to impress and a sense of “difference” between them and their students.

“Teaching situations in which students as well as teachers are deeply affected by fear of rejection, by doubt and insecurity about their own abilities, and by an often unexpressed anger towards each other are counter-educational. Nobody will show his most precious talent to those he fears”[3].

Thirdly, Nouwen characterizes much theological education as answering questions that students are not asking. This is for Nouwen, not so much a criticism of much of the content of lectures – which are often the description of an historical problem and then the delivery of an historical answer – although Nouwen would be dismissive of this also - but of the refusal to use the experiences of the students as a teaching resource, and therefore the most volatile personal issues become cold and dead.

“Sometimes teachers speak about love and hate, fear and joy, hope and despair while students make abundant notes or look out of the window in boredom”[4].

Because the teacher does not help the student to make his or her own experiences available to themselves as a basis for understanding.

Fourthly, and foundationally, theology is not adequately linked to personal spirituality. Doctrine, indeed Scripture itself, is not alien formulation to which we must adhere, but a record of the experience of God by a previous generation. So how can it be taught without evoking experience of God? Behind this pedagogical intention lies Nouwen’s attitude to ministry – the ministry his students will exercise and the ministry he was exercising in teaching them. For them, authentic ministry must flow out of the knowledge of God and themselves, arrived at through spiritual disciplines rather than relying on pastoral techniques and “relevance”. For him, ministry in the classroom will involve witness because:

“We are not asked to teach a discipline like Mathematics, Physics, History or Languages, but we are called to make our own faith available to others as the source of learning. To be a teacher means indeed to lay down your life for your friends……….To be a teacher means to offer your own faith experience, your loneliness and intimacy, your doubts and hopes, your failures and successes to your students as a context in which they can struggle with their own quest for meaning”[5]. (WP p119)

A new model

If all of this is so, then we need a new model of theological education. In an earlier book, written as a result of his teaching at Notre Dame, (Creative Ministry) he had been equally negative about current educational practice, but did not have the conceptual tool to present an adequate alternative. In Reaching Out he draws the various threads together within the biblical motif of hospitality. In Nouwen’s hands it becomes an impressive and innovative model for theological education.

Reaching Out describes three movements of the soul: from loneliness to solitude, from hostility to hospitality and from illusion to prayer and it is in the central movement that we find his thoughts on education. Nouwen’s use of the term “hospitality” must not be taken to mean “sweet kindness”, tea parties, or inviting a stranger into our house. He uses it to describe a fundamental attitude towards our fellow human beings that moves beyond fear of the stranger, even hostility towards him or her, and instead creates a “free and friendly space” that the stranger can enter and become a friend – not in order to change the stranger, but to provide the space within which they can change. It is a “friendly emptiness”[6]. (RO p69) It is not easy to create such space in our busy lives or within our pre-occupied minds, but it is fundamental to our relationship with others. He goes on to illustrate this in three sets of relationships: parents and children, teachers and students, and healers and patients. It is in explaining this second relationship – teachers and students – that he expands his model of education, clearly with a special eye to his teaching at Yale Divinity School.

What does it mean to be hospitable to students?

“The teacher is called upon to create for his students a free and fearless space where mental and emotional development can take place”[7].

This space is not without boundaries. The pattern is that of receptivity on the part of the teacher, inviting the student into our world on his or her terms. And yet there is space for confrontation. We do not hide ourselves behind neutrality. We are ourselves because “no real dialogue is possible between somebody and nobody”. There has to be a balance of receptivity and confrontation – the sort of relationship Nouwen enjoyed with his spiritual mentor at the abbey of Genesee:

“John Eudes listened to me with care and interest, but also with a deep conviction and a clear view: ………… he offered me space to deliberate about choices and to make decisions but did not withhold his opinion that some choices and opinions were better than others: he let me find my own way but did not hide the map that showed the right direction. John Eudes emerged not only as a listener, but also as a guide”[8]. (Genesee p15)

Nouwen was experiencing this fruitful relationship at the same time as he was completing Reaching Out in a long retreat at Genesee.

Now this implies for teachers, a radically different view of our students.

“Students are not just the poor, needy, ignorant beggars who come to a man or woman of knowledge, but that they are indeed like guests who honour the house with their visit, will not leave it without having made their own contribution”[9].

So the teacher, as a good host, believes in his students. He or she believes that they each carry a promise, a gift, that they want to reveal to anyone who shows genuine interest[10]. (RO p81) Tutor attitudes change rapidly when this perspective is employed. Perhaps we have forgotten that it is more blessed to give than to receive – and if this is so, why do we not sometimes shut up and allow the students the happiness of giving also?[11] (Creative Ministry, p23)

The teacher’s job as host is two-fold. Firstly, he or she has to reveal, to let the students see, amid all their self-doubt, that they have a gift to give to the process of education. Secondly, it is to affirm, to encourage them, to share, reflect, develop, with excitement, their way and their vision.

Such a reorientation is difficult and painful for most teachers. They are set up to give, not receive, to be strong for students, not weak for them, to share material not themselves: which after all, is a much easier model within which to live and work.

“It is so easy to impress students with books they have not read, with terms they have not heard, or with situations with which they are unfamiliar. It is much more difficult to be a receiver and help the students distinguish carefully between the wheat and tares in their own lives and to show the beauty of the gifts they are carrying with them”[12].

But this only happens when teachers “detach themselves from their need to impress and control”.

Words

During his time as a teacher at Yale, Nouwen became more preoccupied with the role of words and the importance of silence. Our world is full of words. Often they are used lightly, or used in order to manipulate. There are so many words in our society that they have lost their creative power – they are just words. Words have become part of our inner compulsion. We find it hard to exist without them. We even use them to maintain our own safe world, by our inner talk[13]. (RO p72) In The Way of the Heart, Nouwen’s key illustration of the misuse of words is contemporary theological education. “If there is a crisis in theological education, it is first and foremost a crisis of the word”[14].

Why? Because the way we use words has shifted us away from the great and only purpose of theological education.

“What else is the goal of theological education than to bring us closer to the Lord our God so that we may be more faithful to the great commandment to love him with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind, and our neighbour as ourselves”?[15]

That is not what is happening. Instead, theological teachers find themselves entangled in complex networks of discussion about God and God issues. Our heightened “verbal ability” leads us into finer and finer distinctions and often away from God. Nouwen is careful to point out that critical, subtle, intellectual work has a place in theological education, but only to the extent that it helps us to fulfil our purpose as stated above, which is all about being led closer to God. In other words, academic work is subordinate to the intent of spiritual development.

Nouwen’s remedy is silence. It used to be the monasteries that were the key hosts for theological education and they are more appropriate than secular universities. Teachers and students need silence in their lives in order to seek God and preserve the fire of faith within. Then we can return to words and find that our silence has given our words back the power they lost in secular and academic transactions.

The theorist as teacher

So how well did Nouwen practice his convictions as a theological educator at Yale ? He is famous for the gulf between his own unreconciled heart and the content of his books. However, despite his own protestations[16] (F.p120) such a wide gulf did not exist between his vision of what a theology teacher should be and his own attempts to fulfil that role. He already knew when he came, that he did not want to be an ordinary Yale professor and negotiated in advance that he would not have to work for a doctorate and would not be required to write scholarly articles but would be allowed to teach and write in his own way with his rather different objectives. He was looking for a ministry rather than an academic career.

He worked hard and prepared meticulously for his lectures, but he was most interested in the students as people. He always had an eye to the use of physical space, hunting out the most suitable classrooms, coming around the desk to engage directly with the students, but it was his engagement with the students in friendship which was even more important for him. Every Monday evening he held Open House, real relationships were formed and he would go further than others. Philip Yancey tells a story from a later time, but which seems typical of the man. Yancey was dining with Eugene Peterson and Richard Foster and they began to talk about letters that they had received from readers. Foster and Peterson told of a young man they had both been in correspondence with and to whom they had recommended certain books. Foster, however, had also learnt that the same person had also written to Nouwen who had invited the young man to live with him for a month so that he could personally mentor him. Yancey’s comment on Nouwen was, “his entire life, in fact, displayed a ‘holy inefficiency’” because it was so strongly people orientated.[17]

Nouwen also tried to signal to the students his concern that theological education was fundamentally a spiritual exercise, in a number of ways. His lectures began with Bible reading, silence and intercession to create a sense of the presence of God. He celebrated the Eucharist every evening in a small basement room for all who wished to come, Catholic or otherwise. Even his Monday night Open House ended with the Psalms and prayer.

In the act of teaching itself, he always tried to put into practice his convictions about the role of vulnerability on behalf of tutor and student. This is how one of his students writes:

“Henri was able to use such daily experiences as loneliness, anger, joy, friendship and busyness to instruct his students in the ways of the Spirit and to persuade them of the essential relation between spirituality and ministry. Henri himself most often described this effort as an attempt to see the connection between their own life stories and the one great story of God’s redemption of the world in and through Jesus Christ”.[18]

In doing so, he seemed to have an infectious enthusiasm and gentleness with people. His lectures were unusually popular – a visitor from Tokyo tells how he had to stand at the back of a crowded classroom. His own search for silence and authenticity led him, during his time at Yale, to spend two retreats of about seven months each at the Trappist Monastery of the Genesee in New York State.

Moving towards an assessment

My initial reaction to Nouwen on theological education was that of many others, an initial warming of the heart to his ideals but an exasperation that they are not practical in the present situation. Maybe the way we do theological education is contextualised into the higher educational system to the point of compromise, but no one is standing up to change the basic approach. Nouwen’s ideas are especially unsettling for the lecturer operating within a standard academic system and yet they seem to him or her especially impractical. We are not trained for, neither are we given the classroom time in our busy courses for pursuing the spiritual development of the student in this way.

However, Nouwen deserves a strong defence in this matter. We have a snapshot of the state of spiritual formation in North American seminaries in the 1970s and it is a bleak picture (note).[19] Even today in many situations the new-found emphasis on spiritual formation has not delivered a substantial change in attitude or curriculum in the colleges. In World Council of Churches circles, the Iona process’s insistence on the inter-permeability of academics and spiritual formation[20] has been made more difficult by the increasing tendency across the world for colleges to seek university affiliation and therefore, to an extent, the very university model of education that Nouwen feared.

Yet are the two incompatible? Theological education has benefited greatly by university academic attitudes such as carefulness in study and a refusal to follow obscurantist paths. All theological education is some sort of compromise with the prevailing educational culture; it is, like politics, the art of the possible. And there are lecturers who openly give themselves to the students rather than simply give them their notes and their ideas; who, like Nouwen, welcome the students as they are in all their preciousness and reality, as well as requiring the 2,000 word essay by Friday 5 pm. And, as Nouwen saw clearly, in our present formalised system, much real education needs to, and does, take place outside the classroom between the student and the teacher.

The task for theological education working with the higher educational system is, however, as Nouwen describes it, a de-coupling of the system and the attitudes, as far as possible. We have to refuse involvement in such things as academic pride, competition, formal rules and requirements, status and the personal irrelevance of teaching content and method as being hindrances to the real task. If we do not, we will rightly deserve the criticism of Newbigin when he talked of the Babylonian captivity of theological education by the universities.[21] (Note)

Reading Nouwen, it is also easy to be sceptical of his deep reliance on the personal experiences of the student as the location, or at least the starting point, of learning. Of course, he was especially equipped to take this route because of his previous studies in psychology but his insistence on this has much deeper roots – in respect for the student and in rejection of the academic methodology of arguing from principles to practice, ideas to life. In his Yale writings he certainly swung the pendulum to the other side of the arc. Emphasising as he does the personal experiences of the student and the teacher and the dynamic which that creates for learning, he does not give much space to the importance of the experiences of God in others outside that possibly claustrophobic duality. It is scripture and the history of the church that helps us to find the right questions even if they are not on the surface of our experience at the time. This too is part of the educational process and is a precious gift to the student.

Yet, Nouwen’s insistence that his student’s spirituality is his or her own journey which contains knowledge and encouragement for us all is refreshingly better than the older “moulding” idea of a student’s spiritual life (still around in theological education today) which seeks to gradually conform it to a known pattern or idealised example. With the increased interest in the spiritual development of the student today and the questions that are arising about how this is “measurable” or can be expressed in “learning outcomes” which are the same for all, we need Nouwen’s emphasis all the more.

Nouwen’s thought here, however, is deeper and more original than an early discovery of the importance of individual student learning. His emphasis is, in fact, more on the teacher than the student. The teacher comes into an encounter with the student and shares himself or herself with the student in a close hospitable relationship in and outside the classroom. It is this experience within which real learning takes place: a little like Bonhoeffer’s community “Life Together”[22] but with more intensity of joint sharing as the basis for real learning.

And here, Henri, I do get worried. I know that this is how it sometimes plays on the ground. We remember how a lecturer enters our life more than how he or she enters our mind, long after college days are over and there is so much room here for the teacher to use the classroom as a personal therapy opportunity. And how many different motives are there for friendship with students? Is Nouwen’s (and our) desire for acceptance leaking into the process? Where is truth in all this? Do we not have to cultivate as strong a relationship with the truth as with students? To be a witness to revelation, as well as to our own experiences?

And yet, behind Nouwen’s concerns is one great commitment to a central idea. To work in theological education is to be a minister. Academics who lecture are not theological educators, only those who see themselves as ministers of the gospel to people – in our case students. And so the rules of Christian ministry apply. So we say with Paul that, “we did not only share the gospel with you but our very selves”[23] and we wash students feet.

I found it both disturbing and exciting to be told by Nouwen that words do not matter as much as we think and that silence is a key part of theological education. Nouwen is, of course, open to the charge of inconsistency. It is not hard to see that he uses words to convey his ideas on the importance of silence and that this is the great function of words, to be the pack donkeys of ideas. Indeed, words are the tools we use to serve God in our calling. It is in this area, among others, that we have to question Nouwen’s assertion that academic work is in order to serve spiritual development. True ideas, encapsulated in words, are a purpose and objective of theological education, regardless of their “use” in spiritual development, practical ministry, or anything else. It is hard to justify a priority within the three great purposes of theological education – academic, spiritual and ministerial development. It is better to see them, as Grogan has happily put it,[24] as bound together in a form of perichoresis, each bringing the other into fullness and the life of theological education circulating unhindered between them.

But we are too wordy, and this has, as Nouwen pointed out would happen, reduced the impact of our words themselves. We are also usually too active and in danger of seeing the purpose of theological education in functional terms of mainly providing the skills necessary for ministry. Helping teachers and students to bring silence into their lives is a forgotten task in theological education.

The amazing fact is that Henri Nouwen wrote and practised his ideas and attitudes in theological education as a Yale professor, inside the theological education system. For all his criticisms, he was able to have a productive and happy ministry there for 10 years (though this could not be said of his time at Harvard later). He was in the university but not of it, thus proving what many of us have long felt, that theological education is 80% interaction between an open student and a good teacher and only 20% to do with the system, the organisation and the school. As such, he speaks with real authority to those of us who have allowed the foolishness of trying to draw people closer to God by using a secular pattern of education, to carry on unchallenged; who have hidden ourselves from our students behind the lectern; and who have thought that words are enough to nourish the soul. He has said to those of us who have forgotten that theological education is always Christian ministry.

Nice talking to you, Henri.

Graham Cheesman

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[5] John Mogabgab, “The Spiritual Pedagogy of henri Nouwen” Reflection, vol. 78 no. 2, January1981.

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[11] Henri Nouwen, Creative Miniistry, New York: Doubleday, 1971, p23.

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[14] Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, New York: Ballentine, 1981, pp39f.

[15] Ibid. p39.

[16] Michael Ford Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri J.M. Nouwen, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1999, p 120.

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